


World War Z - Sweden

by Axelogos



Category: World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Gen, Post-Zombie Apocalypse, Sweden - Freeform, TW - Suicide, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-17 11:39:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/867115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Axelogos/pseuds/Axelogos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A fanfiction that takes the format of a standard chapter from World War Z, with the nameless author of the book interviewing a survivor of the Zombie War. This one deals with Sweden during the war and the horrible losses suffered there. It can be read without having read World War Z, though there are some references to the rest of the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World War Z - Sweden

**Stockholm, Sweden**

 

**[We are sitting in a café on the deck of a boat, overlooking the interconnected Stockholm Palace and Parliament House that were fortified during the war. Peter Lindberg tells me he comes here often, to think and reflect over the war and his role in it. He looks very aged and tired, seeming to be much older than his 43 years. He wears a friendly face that slowly fades into a more sombre, almost shamed expression as he tells the story of his country's struggle against the living dead]**

 

Before you judge us and dissmiss us as fools for not following the Redeker plan like most other countries, I want you to understand something about pre-war Sweden. We'd been at peace for over 200 years. Our military was well equipped with modern weapons but it was small, almost pathetically so. Yeah we sent a few soldiers as peacekeepers to Afghanistan and the like, and we might take a casualty or two. But war? It was completely unknown to us. We didn't have the experience on any level. We had strict gun laws, there were a lot less guns per person in Sweden than in your country. I think beyond law enforcement and military, most guns were in the hands of hunters. We had one advantage though – winter. It made us overconfident. I guess you could say in some sense we had it coming.

Don't believe the common prejudices about Sweden's climate. We don't have polar bears walking on the streets of Stockholm. Sure, our capitol is not that far south of Anchorage in Alaska. But we have something Alaska doesn't have – the Gulf Stream that brings warm water from the Caribbean to Europe. Our summers are pretty nice, not too hot nor too cool. Our winters... well they may have their really cold days but they are definitely a lot more pleasant than the Alaskan or Siberian winters. Still, sometimes they set in pretty early and last pretty long. The winter the year the Great Panic hit was such a winter.

Frost began early, already in October we had our frost nights and the first snow fell early in November. Sure, it didn't stay long in the beginning but it did help slow the dead down. And boy did we need it! By this time the Middle East was already being hit pretty hard, and we have been a lot more accepting of refugees from there than many other European countries. Not as accepting as I'd have liked, but more than most of the others at least. This of course led to a large influx of infected refugees.

A lot of them died and turned on the way here, but some made it through, possibly infected by their turned relatives on the way here or at the very least bringing horrible stories of the dead walking. Along with most of the rest the of the industrialized world, we still believed it was simply a new strain of rabies spreading rapidly, but if winter hadn't set in so early the combination of traumatized refugees and rising amount of outbreaks might have caused our own “Great Panic” months before yours.

But anyway, winter set in and things calmed down. There were a few outbreaks in morgues and the like when people found the frozen corpses of zombies, but nothing big. Still, it was enough to make people a bit more suspicious than overseas. You see, we didn't have your massive media corporations who only cared about the short-time gain of keeping people scared but in the dark. Sure, we have corporation-run media, but there is also the large state television company, just like the BBC in Britain.

When the Great Panic hit America and the truth about the infection was revealed to the world, we still had winter. The first 24 hours of our great panic were just like your own minus the zombies, but things calmed down pretty quickly after that, when the government assured people that we still had time to prepare. The panic didn't go away completely but most of the panicked looting became panicked shopping and stockpiling instead.

The Riksdag, our parliament, called an emergency session. For three days they bickered about what to do. Even before the dead started walking we always had trouble getting along in there. Half a dozen parties, many of them split between the new-thinkers and those more resistant to change. Now suddenly there was a completely new issue and no one could agree on how to deal with it. We are talking about a country that had serious trouble handling the tsunami disaster in south-east Asia in 2004!

On the third day, something happened that I think saved us all. The then Crown Princess Victoria walked straight into the Riksdag and practically told them what to do. She scolded them for bickering in such a time of crisis, and “suggested” a small, purposeful group be formed, composed of experts instead of politicians and that they should outline a plan and have it ready by tomorrow.

I was one of those chosen for that group. There was the Supreme Commander of Sweden's armed forces, there was a high-ranking policeman, someone from the security service, a couple of ministers, a virologist and half a dozen other “experts”. I was there officially as an “environmental advisor” as the environment minister had declined to be in the meeting. I don't think it was what she had intended, too many people with too little to add, but it was far better than the whole Riksdag.

The Crown Princess presided over the meeting. It was unprecedented, I'm pretty sure it was technically against our constitution. The royal family isn't supposed to have any political power. But no one said a word about it. She was the only one in the room who didn't seem scared. She quickly made us summarize the problem. She didn't point fingers or assign blame, didn't even ask why nothing had been done before even though we had our own copy of the Warmbrunn-Knight report. She simply asked “what can we do about it?”

The discussion was heated in the beginning. But she was a good leader, she calmed us down, brought the discussion to a calm, controlled level. We soon realized that it was probably too late for the Israeli solution. The infection had spread too far and there was so much sparsely populated land that there was no way of knowing how far-gone the infection was. We decided that the only solution was to establish as many safe-zones as we could and keep them connected if possible. Some were easy. Visby on the island of Gotland for example. Still encircled by a large stone wall. Broken and badly maintained in some places, but a very, very good start. There were a few castles here and there we could use as smaller safe-zones too.

Those and a few others, along with underground bunkers and a couple of mines became the “hard zones”. Zones that were to be fortified, equipped and supplied with the intent of holding out long-term even if every thing else went to hell. Then there were the “soft zones”. These were established with several layers. The innermost layer was to be fortified as well as possible. After all zones had been established we'd work on turning them into hard zones. The outer layers were meant to stop smaller groups of undead and make sure no infected individuals would enter. Checkpoints at the entrances to and inside the zones were set up to screen individuals for infection.

A hard zone was set up in the heart of Stockholm, mainly using the Palace and Parliament House. Around it was one of the safest and largest soft zones. Stockholm is built on and around a group of islands, and they used this to their advantage. Water might not stop a horde of zombies, but it definitely helps control traffic. Finally, a defensive line was erected in the north, everything beyond it evacuated south. The entire area beyond the defensive line was dubbed the “fortified zone”.

**So you basically designed your own Redeker plan?**

This was nothing like the Redeker plan! We had time on our side, the infection wasn't that bad yet. We didn't have to leave defenceless civilians as “bait”, we could try to save everyone. The system of zones let us save as many as possible.

**Did it work?**

Almost. Once we presented the rough draft of the plan with that many names on it, it was voted through pretty quickly. The chaos in the rest of the world convinced us that drastic measures were needed. The Norwegians picked up on our plan a few days into its implementation and we combined our northern defensive line and combined our fortified zone. What we didn't count on was the pure mass of refugees.

Sweden is a country of natural borders. We have the Baltic and North Atlantic covering more than half of our nation's border and a large mountain range covering the majority of the border to Norway. Usually people come in by plane, boat or over the bridge to Denmark in southern Sweden. We had decided to send away most refugees not from Sweden or Norway as our country could only support so many. Even if we could screen for infection, there was no way we could feed and protect half of Europe. I was against it at the time, but in hindsight... Well let's just say that a lot more sneaked over the border before we could establish our coastal fences than we had anticipated.

It happened everywhere of course. People flocking onto anything that could float, desperate to get out to sea. Here in Europe, almost all of them went north. We had just begun setting up the perimeters on our soft zones when we were overwhelmed by a flood of refugees. With the thaw possibly only days away, the panic resurfaced. We barely managed to finish the basic preparations before the thaw began in southern Sweden.

Then our plan was put to the test. It actually worked better than expected. We had anticipated some inflow of refugees, just not at the numbers we saw, so the souther soft zones were a bit harder than the more northern ones. We'd also begun fortifying the main railway lines. Without them, we wouldn't have lasted the first year. They fell eventually, during late autumn when the first real hordes started forming. But they stayed up long enough for us to balance out our refugees between the main soft zones, move supplies and materials to where they were needed and so on.

**Fortified railway lines?**

It wasn't anything fancy. We just gave them some better, sturdier fences and made sure there was no way past them. Even after the fences fell, we still sent the occasional train, armed with a plough to keep the undead at bay. It worked pretty well, though I wouldn't call it “safe”. It worked, mainly because there weren't enough people outside the soft zones for the undead to infect. We held out pretty well during the first year. Then winter came and we went out to resupply. We thought we were pretty safe, all in all.

**But that didn't last?**

No. When spring came again, the chaos and destruction in the rest of the world caught up with us. Finland fell during the first months, becoming almost completely overrun. A lot of zombies washed up on the shores too. Our northern defence line was being hard-pressed. That's when Norway pulled out of the cooperation. I remember it well. As a member of the crisis council that had been formed from the original investigation group, I attended the meeting where the Norwegian ambassador relayed a message from his country saying that they were planning on pulling back, fortifying themselves in the central, western part of their country.

Some were angry. Others chocked. Without Norway's support, we'd have to fortify the entire border to Norway to prevent large migrations of undead. We didn't have that kind of manpower, nor even supplies enough to do it. We didn't have a lot of nice, cosy mountains to fall back to like the Norwegians.

We'd planned for this of course. We'd planned for everything by then. But that also meant loss predictions. Without the northern border, the hordes from Finland and Russia would swarm our soft zones before we were ready. Even with the time-frame offered to us by the Norwegians, there was no way we could guarantee that the soft zones could hold against the pressure. We expected as many as a fifth of the larger soft zones to fail more or less completely, and at least half to suffer major breaches, forcing a retreat to an inner level of the zone. We also knew that if too many zones failed and their inhabitants were turned we might end up with so many zombies in Sweden that pretty much every larger soft zone on mainland Sweden would suffer heavy casualties, maybe even fall completely.

You'll have to understand, we didn't have enough soldiers to guard the soft zones. They were mostly enclosed in a few layers of barbed wire and fences. It worked great to stop smaller groups of zombies, getting them stuck in the barbed wire or making them tear themselves apart, letting the defenders just patrol along the edge, finishing off the zombies with ease. But against a horde of thousands and thousands of undead, pressing further and further through the defences? Worthless.

The outer soft zones fell like dominoes. The few northern ones first, then more and more as they came to the more populous south. Stockholm fared well initially. The soft zone there was at that point home to over three million people, about a third of Sweden's pre-war population. So naturally we fortified it as best we could. Concrete walls, trenches, the lot. It was enough to hold them at bay. For a while at least.

**What happened then?**

It was a chaotic time. Every day, we'd hear about a new soft zone that was badly hit, sometimes the casualties numbered the thousands. Umeå was the first really large soft zone that fell completely, with only the small hard zone surviving. Over a hundred thousand people died or were turned when that soft zone fell. When Uppsala, the fourth largest soft zone, fell to the hordes we were really concerned over here. There were plans on evacuating people to Gotland and trying to use it as a final bastion in case the mainland fell. But the initial success at Stockholm made us forget those plans. We started to hope again.

Even though millions had died when winter fell, we thought ourselves pretty safe. We brought the defences of the surviving soft zones to the same level as Stockholm, resupplied and dug in a bit better. We destroyed as many undead as we could find near the cities but we made no real effort to severely harm the horde. We didn't think we'd need it. We were overconfident. We should have known better.

The thing is, just because you can survive the onslaught of a few hundred thousand zombies for a few months doesn't mean you can do it for ever. The next spring, we paid for that overconfidence. Gothemburg fell within a month. How? One stupid mistake. The trains. You see, the trains were still running. A high-speed train will move so fast, it will barely affect the horde. Sure, it might start moving in the direction of the train initially, but as soon as it's gone, the slightest temptation elswhere will change its direction again. However, if the horde is already at the end station... We'd built multiple gates, just to stop zombies from breaking through when a train passed. They'd have to arrive before we closed the first gate, get through the second one before that one closed too and then the third, while meanwhile exposed to fire from the defenders in all directions.

It worked fine the two previous years. But by now, the horde surrounding Gothemburg was nearing the millions. They came chasing after the train, pushing against those large steel doors. The doors were meant to handle the temporary pressure of a few thousand dead, not half of the horde over several hours. They bent, and they fell. The defenders behind the first line drew in more zombies. The second pair of gates fell. More defenders, more pressure. Behind the third pair, hastily assembled defences and troops paired with panicing people lured even more of them in. They broke, and the horde flooded the city within hours. They fell back to the second line of defence, but that wasn't as strong and fell before dawn.

Gothemburg is a city divided by a river. Initially they thought the river would protect them. But the horde simply flooded it, crashing through every single layer of the defences until only a few hard zones remained. Over a million people, dead, turned or at least doomed to be, within 24 hours.

[He pauses here, and can barely meet my gaze at all from this point]

We suspended all train travel of course, but it was too late. The trains were just a quick way in. The horde could wait. With the concentration around Gothemburg, even the hard zones fell after the first few weeks. The horde moved on. We reopened our plans for evacuation to Gotland, but by the time we were ready to implement them, Malmö had fallen, along with most other soft zones in southern Sweden. Stockholm was hard-pressed too and we were soon forced back to the final line. We managed to evacuate almost a million people before then. That still meant almost two million more zombies.  
  
It was at this point the crisis council had really begun shrinking. Some quit, not willing to shoulder the responsibilty. In the beginning they were replaced but at this point there was no time for that. Some killed themselves because they couldn't take the pressure. I remember there being five of us including the Queen, her father had died last winter and she'd been coronated shortly before the summer thaw, when we received a report saying that our defences would only hold another two days and we'd be forced to fall back to the hard zone after that. We were only three the next morning.

In the end, we lost almost nine tenths of the countrys population before the war was over. We could have followed the Redeker plan when the others did. The norweigans even offered to let us flee into their country and join up with them. No one has said anything out loud, but I know they blame us. The crisis council. Not the Queen of course. She never had any power, barely even spoke her mind. She wasn't allowed to. But the rest of us. Only me and her left now. The Supreme Commander was the last to go. Killed himself on VC Day.

**Did the war cost you a lot personally, beyond the responsibilities you were forced to shoulder?**

Not really. I had the power to make sure my family got out safe and sound. I lost a few friends, and a lot of colleagues. And some relatives took their lives or were lost before they could be evacuated. But I got out relatively well compared to most. Doesn't lessen the burden of guilt. I know intellectually that we did everything we could. That we took the best decisions based on what we knew. That none of us was even remotely qualified for this. We saved lives. It's just... we could have saved so many more.

[Peter Lindberg killed himself two days after this interview.]


End file.
